Pentek's VME/VXS board packs plenty of Gigabit serial I/O
-- Test & Measurement World, 2/4/2008 10:40:00 AM
In addition to a Freescale MPC8641D Dual Core PowerPC AltiVec processor and a Xilinx Virtex-4 FX Series FPGA, the Model 4207 VME/VXS board from Pentek provides a fabric-transparent crossbar switch that bridges multiple Gigabit serial resources.
The board includes two PMC/XMC sites, dual VXS ports, dual Fibre Channel ports, and two optical serial transceivers. Native protocols support PCI Express, Serial RapidIO, Fibre Channel, and Xilinx Aurora, all accommodated by the crossbar switch. Up to 4 Gbytes of DDR2 SDRAM simplifies data buffering and boosts real-time signal processing.
You can select either a single-core MPC8641 or dual-core MPC8641D processor executing at a maximum frequency of 1.5 GHz. These processors perform 128-bit parallel processing of multiple data elements and deliver floating-point digital signal processing rates of up to 12,000 GFLOPS. Each includes built-in Gigabit fabric support with both 8X PCI Express and 4X Serial RapidIO serial data ports.
The Model 4207 also offers a choice of Virtex-4 FX Series FPGAs, the XC4VFX60 or XC4VFX100, with 56,880 and 94,896 logic cells, respectively. Two 4X RocketIO ports provide a high-speed serial path between the FPGA and the crossbar switch for connection to other parts of the board, including the processor, VXS interface, and XMC sites. These ports can also be configured as four 2X paths.
Prices for the Model 4207 start at $14,725. Pentek, www.pentek.com.
